Another Green World - Music and Lyrics

Music and Lyrics

Another Green World represents a turning point in Brian Eno's musical career. While his previous albums contained quirky rock songs, on Another Green World only five of the fourteen tracks have lyrics. The instrumental tracks explore a new kind of sound that is more quiet and restful, marking the change between Eno's earlier rock songs and his later instrumental works in which texture and timbre are the most important musical elements. "Sky Saw" opens the album with the instruments constantly changing structure, except for one of the two bass parts which plays the same pattern throughout. Eno has re-used differently mixed instrumentations of "Sky Saw" for a track for Music for Films and a song for Ultravox's debut album which he would later produce. "Over Fire Island" has a jazz influence on the bass and drumming style. "In Dark Trees" and "The Big Ship" are two songs on which Eno plays all the instruments, namely the synthesiser, synthetic percussion and treated rhythm generator. The pulse of these songs is provided by the repeated rhythm coming from the rhythm box. These instrumental pieces and others like "Little Fishes" have been described as "highly imagistic, like paintings done in sound that actually resemble their titles".

To create the lyrics, Eno would later play the backing tracks singing nonsense syllables to himself, then taking them and forming them into actual words, phrases and meaning. This lyric-writing method was used for all his vocal-based recordings of the 1970s. The tracks that do feature lyrics are in the same free-associative style as Eno's previous albums. The humour in the lyrics has been described as "less bizarre than gently whimsical and addled".